works like Tide, priced like Awesome!

And for those of you who don’t recognize the name….Awesome is a brand of laundry detergent you can buy at the Dollar Store. The reviews are good (I guess) but the issue isn’t so much the price for me (even though the price is waaaaay to high), it’s the ingredients. Yes, I am a label reader….even for my laundry soap. 🙂

I’ve toyed with making laundry detergent for about a year now. Back when we had a brick and mortar I made some dry mix. That worked well because I could wash in hot water and the soap shavings would melt and all would be well….however, on the road, sometimes all we get is a cold water wash. The first, and last, time I washed on the road with a homemade dry laundry detergent was a loooong day. I had to re-wash. End of homemade dry laundry soap.

Enter homemade liquid laundry detergent! I found many sites over the months who said that making liquid laundry detergent is easy. So yesterday I decided to go ahead and do it. I was out of store bought (at the price of my left leg) detergent and needed some more. I had all the ingredients so I figured why not?! And what exactly ARE those ingredients you ask? It’s very very simple.

Borax

Washing Soda

Fels Naptha bar soap

Really though you could use almost any bar soap. This one just seems to be a universal favorite of the homemade laundry makers! You can get all those ingredients from Walmart or Ace Hardware. And it’s pretty cheap too. It should cost less than $10 and will make you a LOT of homemade laundry detergent.

Here’s how I did it….

I chopped up 1/3 of a bar of soap and put it into a pot with about 6 cups of water and set it to simmer. Make sure you stir it occasionally and once the soap chunks have melted add in 1/2 c of borax and 1/2 c of washing soda. Mix well and then add another 6 cups of water and mix well.

At this point I realized that I didn’t have a very big jug. The one I had was my old Arm & Hammer 75 oz soap container. Dernit. So I just poured what I had in the pot into that jug and filled the rest up with water.

Voila!

A homemade jug of concentrated laundry detergent. After it sat for a while (to cool) I opened it to have a look and realized that it was SUPER thick. I decided to leave it this way simply because I didn’t have anything else to put it in. If I did, I would probably cut it 50/50 with water to thin it out to a pourable consistency. As it is now, I just put about 1/4 of a cup into a container and add water and shake it up before putting it into the washer.

I did laundry today and my clothes came out clean and smelling fresh! If you like a scent you can add some essential oils to the pot and mix it in before you pour it into whatever container you have. But since Carl’s nose works like a bloodhounds, we don’t do a lot of smell-good stuff ’round these parts. (it makes the games of hide and seek a little unfair!)

I really like that I can make 3 very large batches of laundry soap for less than ten bucks and feel better knowing that we are all wearing clothes that don’t have a) residual soap in them, b) chemicals from said soap, and c) any ingredient that might cause allergic reactions!